Chocolate
nounA sweet food made from roasted and ground cacao seeds, eaten as a bar or used in cooking.
How to spell chocolate
9 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce chocolate
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does chocolate mean?
- nounA sweet food made from roasted and ground cacao seeds, eaten as a bar or used in cooking.
Chocolate in a sentence
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A bar of chocolate is a small luxury.
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I love dark chocolate with sea salt.
Where does chocolate come from?
Language of origin: Spanish
The word comes from the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, who drank a bitter beverage they called xocolatl, a name often explained as combining xococ, meaning 'bitter' or 'sour', with atl, meaning 'water'. Spanish colonists encountered this cacao drink in Mexico in the 1500s and carried both the substance and the word back to Europe, where Spanish reshaped it into chocolate. English borrowed the Spanish form in the early 1600s, and the spelling stayed close to the Spanish even as the product changed from a spiced drink into the sweet solid bar we know today. The tricky middle of the word is the unstressed second syllable, often swallowed in speech as 'choc-lit', which is exactly why writers drop the silent 'o' and forget the soft '-ate' ending. Keeping the Spanish chocolate in mind, with its clear three syllables, helps fix the spelling.
How the word is built
- chocolat- (from Nahuatl xocolatl)
- -e (English spelling ending)
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